Organizations and businesses of all sizes and missions, buy a diverse array of assets. By way of example, large companies with data centers may contain computer related assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It is estimated between 10 and 15% of this inventory, particularly in data centers, are spares ranging from critical components needed to maintain in-production assets to complete standby systems.
There are other hidden problems that need to be mitigated that are high risk resulting from the inability to track spares movements. Spares become obsolete as they age in the cage. Also cash flow chokes, brought on through overstocking directly impact the bottom line. The significance of these and other situations become exacerbated when multiplied across numerous data centers.
Yet the physical management and audit of spares inventories, particularly in large corporate data centers, today is one of the fundamental challenges that has plagued organizations with data centers throughout history.
Estimates confirm that U.S. industries purchase more than $700 billion per year on parts and supplies to support company operations. Surprisingly, most are not able to justify these investments because they cannot systematically track how spares are used.
To this point, capturing spares data, if carried out at all, has been an almost entirely manual process that consumes valuable people time and is fraught with potential errors.
While recognized as a critical activity, datacenter managers and operators, in many instances with limited resources and human capital and knowing the chances of error are high, choose by necessity to avoid such tasks unless forced by circumstance to do so. The challenge is exacerbated by organizations being at breaking point in terms of budgetary, technology, physical space constraints and a shortage of staff. Due to a lack of transparency, accuracy and visibility, every spare has the potential of being unused, made redundant due to obsolescence, lost all together or even stolen. Today many organizations cannot find spares, tell you the value of them or be able to account for changes in their status. When audits are attempted, countless hours are spent by employees trying to accomplish them through basic applications, spreadsheets and in many cases, manual pen and paper processes.
There are few point based methods that seek to address parts of the problem described but there has not, until now, been a total solution that addresses the comprehensive automation of end-to-end spares management, from their procurement, their receipt, stocking and through to deployment. Equally being able to undertake automated spares inventory that dramatically reduces the cost, time and resources required to undertake such tasks is a critical component. The use of clipboards, pen and paper and spreadsheets are still typical of the tools used. And even when information is captured, there are no standard methods or mechanisms that can be used to integrate the data with other important systems and so doing is extremely difficult.